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Ruben Swieringa on Actionscript and a whole lot of other stuff..

Category Archives: Other

I don’t really feel like doing a full recap of three days of this year’s Flash on the Beach (even though I had a most wonderful time), but some shots and videos I took came out pretty well, so I thought I’d post ’em (more photos on my flickr):

Here’s how it works: ‘Organisms’ (the colored moving squares) are thrown into an infrastructure (a collection of connected points, i.e. the circle/star with connected dots). Each organism is assigned a certain destination-point within the infrastructure and carries with it a pathfinder (a polished version of the algorithm I posted about some time ago).

The pathfinder will figure out which points to travel (trial and error, guessing together a route to the assigned destination, see previous post) in order to reach the destination and will then tell its organism where to go.

When two organisms happen to travel the same connection (line between two points in an infrastructure) they will share and compare their knowledge about several of the paths they have traveled, this is visualised by both organisms becoming semi-transparent.

A little over a week ago I made a post about Flex running old versions of my SWF. In a nutshell; Flex Builder 3 seemed to disregard any changes I made to the classes in my (Actionscript-only) project, and compile an SWF with older versions of the edited classes.

A few days later however, I concluded that it was not so much Flex 3 that was causing this issue, but rather Subversion.

Whenever I commited my changes to the Subversion-repository, the latest run-files (Main.swf and Main.html) from the bin-debug-folder on my harddisk would be commited to the html-template-folder in the repository.
As the html-template-folder serves as a template-depot (duh) for your Flex project, any files in it will be copied to the bin-debug-folder after compilation, effectively overwriting your freshly compiled SWF in this scenario.

Initially, this may go by unnoticed, as it will not be untill you update your project (or do a new checkout of the same project), that the run-files will be in the html-template-folder.

I work around this issue by commiting, updating, and removing the run-files from the html-template-folder, but I have yet to come across a proper solution for this problem. So any suggestions are more than welcome. The same goes for any explanation about this strange issue with Subversion..

“your bin, bin-debug and html-template directories should *NOT* be committed to svn.

The problem you are having is that itâ€™s copying all of the files in the html-template folder into the bin-debug folder, including the .svn hidden folder. SVN uses the .svn folder to determine where to put the files in the repository, so when you copy that folder, even though itâ€™s in a different folder than when it started, the files will continue to be copied into the original location.”

“Goto your project properties and pull up the Flex Compiler tab and the first checkbox you should see says somethign to the effect of â€œCopy non-embedded files to the output directoryâ€, well uncheck that. This will allow you to keep your bin folders in the repo”

I might’ve also have called this post “How many more times will I have to re-import my projects into Flex Builder 3!?”, this sucks..

Today I decided to work on a project of mine, so I pulled in the latest version from my Subversion-repository and opened up Flex Builder 3.
I started making some additions in classes etc. and eventually I ran the project. To my confusion the SWF I saw didn’t reflect any of the changes I’d made, so I made some bigger changes and still nothing changed in the generated SWF.

Long story short, Flex just kept showing me the SWF of an older version of the project. Nothing I did helped; I cleaned the project, refreshed it, renamed it.
Eventually I worked around this issue by deleting the project (not the files) from Flex Builder and creating a new one (same location and same main project-file).

Although I fixed this thing for now, my (fairly big) concern now is mainly about how many more times I will have to re-import my projects into Flex Builder 3..
My guess is that this has something to do with the compiler-cache and incremental compilation, but either way, I’d really appreciate it if the Flex Builder development-team would fix this.